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Location: Bologna, Italy

Type: Memorial, Competition

Structure: Multiple

Status: Conceptual Design

Year: 2015

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Architecture is the quiet witness of history. It transforms with the society’s values and its sociocultural life. Not long ago in Europe millions of people were killed because of their beliefs and inclinations, due to the imposition of what they should be. This memorial stands for the differences and contradictions being able to find a new coherence between extremes. It is made out of diverse systems which at first instance cannot coexist, through which it speculates about a coherence built from different connections between the parts.

The space does not tell a story nor does it give a meaning to the materialization of the memorial. It instead wants to leave its meaning open to create a democratic interpretation. We believe silence is the best way to commemorate such a terrible tragedy.

Contradiction

How to materialize a place that preserves the memory of a horrific event without telling a story?

History is preserved in books: this space shouldn’t explain or tell stories. On the other hand, it should yield to the mysterious, the sad, and the sublime.

We have no intention to explain such a tragedy. Rather than giving a close interpretation we want to leave it open, producing a mysterious landscape of weird ornaments and protruded objects where people can think about the monstrosity of the Shoah.

Lines, Fields and Objects

The project is drawn for outside/in as well as inside/out; the contingencies of the site bring the lines of the city grid into the project, producing a strange field of ornaments. On the other hand, the objects are internal protrusions of the ornamented field, finding a new relation between field and objects: the objects cannot exist without the field and its contingencies, but at the same time they are autonomous parts acting as prosthetics within the urban landscape.

This new take on tectonics, objects and fields yields for an ambiguous relation between the parts, hoping that the user can speculate on what this memorial can produce.